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Mechanical Uprising

An electronic orchestra of electric guitars and various samples in the genre of electroacoustic music and musique concrète. Stylistically, a combination of rock with contemporary classical, electronic and experimental music influences.

ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Album Notes

"Mechanical Uprising is an impressive artistic statement that serves as both a compositional and a playing tour de force. I’d recommend it to any guitarist out there with an ear bent for the sonically bold and experimental.” – Scott Collins (Guitar-Muse/guitarchitecture.org)

"...an important work." - Mark S. Tucker (FAME)

"The super-human, the robotic, the surreal and, yes, the "mechanical“ are aesthetic guidelines to Marco Oppedisano's galaxy and for those unafraid of seeing the world through a distorted mirror, they make for some of the most willfully unaccommodating and hauntingly intense music out there at the moment." - Tokafi

OKS Recordings of North America is pleased to announce the release of Mechanical Uprising, our twelfth major release. This CD is available through CDBaby.com as will soon be available at Amazon.com, Los Angeles’ Amoeba Records, Austin, Texas’ End of An Ear and Waterloo, New York’s Other Music. It is available for digital download at iTunes, and many other digital download services.

Marco Oppedisano is a classically trained composer and guitarist with background in rock guitar. His style uniquely melds the experimental guitar playing of Fred Frith, textural guitar styling of David Torn, various rock guitar influences, and the processed guitar electronica of Christian Fennesz. On OKSRNA, Marco has previously released two solo records, Electroacoustic Compositions For Electric Guitar and The Ominous Corner, a collaboration with David Lee Myers, Tesla At Coney Island, and group recording by BIOS, Moving to Palermo To Make Apple Whine, a collaboration with OKSRNA label-mates Bill Byrne (The Painful Leg Injuries) and John Ibarra.

Mechanical Uprising is his third solo release for OKSRNA. As with his other albums, Marco presents compositions that are mostly sourced from his guitar playing, but the similarities end there. Mechanical Uprising is a leaner, muscular, and more precise beast than anything Oppedisano has created before. This album explores on various levels, the relationship between the artist and the machines he uses to make his music.

This tightly controlled and layered sound world of Mechanical Uprising is filled with Marco’s expert guitar playing. At times his guitar improvisations and various samples are manipulated by a computer through editing, effects and processing, yielding a result that could not be accomplished through live performance. Combine the various treatments of guitar and electronic sounds and you have an album that will no doubt leave the listener wondering what is what. Machines play a large part in this music, but Marco’s firm hand is always behind the result.

Kickstart begins the album with what sounds like an electroacoustic musique concrète virtual avant-rock band. The title track, Mechanical Uprising conjures a cinematic narrative of robots coming to life and frantically working until they verge on breaking down. Clockwatcher I-III is a piece that explores our relationship with time by warping our perception of it, basically defying our idea of what watching a clock is actually like.

Oppedisano’s previous solo releases The Ominous Corner and Electroacoustic Compositions for Electric Guitar were met with wide acclaim. Massimo Ricci of Temporary Fault said about The Ominous Corner “…one cannot but appreciate the incredible attention to every tiny detail and the sense of adventurousness.” Tobias Fischer of Tokafi.com said “(The Ominous Corner has) …a quality most comparable releases could only dream of: A nervous, subcutaneous tension keeping you glued to your seat and wondering what's next at all times.” Dave X of Startling Moniker said reviewing Electroacoustic Compositions for Electric Guitar “...(Oppedisano) demonstrates his ability to generate an extremely broad range of sounds from his instrument, from sonorous aquatic bells to swarming clouds of electronic chirping.”

This CD-R release marks the latest major release from the Brooklyn-based OKS Recordings of North America label run by Bill Byrne and his longtime collaborator, Jonah Goldstein. OKSRNA specializes in artist created CD-R releases that cater to the tech-savvy listener who ready for new arenas of creativity for musical expression.

Marco Oppedisano's mind works in overdrive. It is evident in this album which comes across your ears first as a series of cleverly timed and edited pieces of brilliant songwriting and performing. After a few listens you realize that there is a coherency to the pieces and yet all the numbers all have their own unique feel and style.

Marco Oppedisano is one of my favorite experimental guitarists and composers out there today. It's incredibly obvious that he spends countless hours writing and honing his material for his audience; each piece on this new album is guaranteed to be an auditory sojourn that implores you to put on some good quality headphones or earbuds, sit back, and allow Marco to pilot you to some distant, red-giant-orbiting world, replete with automatons that turn against their creators before malfunctioning.

What's really incredible is what you hear on successive listenings. First, Marco isn't merely throwing sounds all over a broad canvas, which the casual, untrained listener might be tempted to believe. True, he is a sound sculptor of the highest order, but the sounds are arranged into a ordered composition, much like some of his avant-garde predecessors, like Edgard Varèse. If you're careful, you can hear the pulse of the music, which isn't always obvious.

In case you were wondering whether Marco can saw your head off with his guitar playing, the answer is an unequivocal yes. This guy woodshedded back in the days of "woodshredding," so he yawns when he plays a 128th-note sweep-picked arpeggio with the mechanical accuracy of a mainframe computer. You hear bits of that technical virtuosity sprinkled throughout the deep, blue pool that is Mechanical Uprising. But Marco's masterful playing is only one small piece of this complex puzzle; his breadth and expertise as a composer is far more advanced than most guitarist-turned-composer types.

Every piece on the record is an attention grabber, but one of my favorites includes the Seven Pieces suite. The Casual Onlooker (VI), consists of several great, clean counterpoint guitar lines, pummeling the listener from multiple directions, in and out of consonance. The Seven Pieces suite is a little different for Marco in that the compositions and performances are a bit more conventional (in an experimental sense), breaking from Marco's strict sound sample compositions.

You owe it to yourself and your music library to buy this and his other releases for your catalog. Marco is one of the greats and is well respected in the guitar playing and experimental music communities.